In article ,
Andy Hall writes:

If you include heating and air conditioning systems in the U.S. it
adds up to over 100,000 fires.

There were 860 deaths in the U.S. and 97 deaths in the UK per year.

However you count it, the rate of problems is around an order of
magnitude higher for a 5:1 population.

I went along to a workshop in New York a few years ago which
someone (may have been IEEE) organised. I was actually there
for a Unix session which was a dead loss, but there were several
others going on too, and one was about precisely this issue.
I only sat in for an hour or so (wish I'd sat throught the whole
thing now), but what I gleened was that US engineers are well
aware of the appaling safety issues with US wiring installations
compared with Europe, Australia, etc. Lots of stats were produced
(ISTR deaths caused by electrical fires is the figure which is way
above the equivalent per-capita figures for all other developed
countries). Even electrocutions were slightly higher than most
220-240V countries (which is ironic as most people would assume
quite the opposite, and I often see people say in newsgroups US
120V must be safer than 240V).

Anyway, I think the issue was that these engineers who were fully
aware of the issue have no power to change anything, and are met
with disbelief when trying to explain the problem to their
government, trade bodies, and electrical equipment manufactures,
who would rather things just stayed as they are.[*]

Subsequently, I had a conversation about this with someone in
the US electrical manufacturing industry. One thing that appears
to be significantly different is people buying products based on
safety/price. His comment was "no one will buy an outlet costing
a dollar, because someone else makes one costing 60c." This is
quite the opposite in the UK -- I would guess that the more
expensive quality products such as MK and Crabtree have a very
significant market share. Personally, I pretty well always buy MK,
even though there will be a cheaper no-name equivalent on the
shelf just next to it for 1/3rd of the price, and this is by no
means uncommon. Anyway, this guy pointed out that his company do
manufacture higher quality versions of many of their products,
but generally these are only bought in Europe -- no market for
them in the US. If anyone here who normally uses UK DIY store
ever gets a chance to wander around the electrical section in a
US equivalent store, you can see exactly what this chap is talking
about.

* I've seen the same issues being raised by US lighting engineers
about US vehicle lighting regs being 40 years behind Europe's,
but the US government won't take any notice as the US vehicle
manufactures don't want to have to redesign their 40 year old
lighting systems.

--
Andrew Gabriel